Reviewed by
Evelyn
Indulging in an afternoon cream tea is one of England’s finest long-standing traditions, and you can now have cream tea gift boxes sent direct to your home every month. How cool is that?!
The company to thank for this unique concept are Sconnoisseur who offer a 3 or 6 month subscription service, and they also sell one-off gift boxes that you can purchase from their online shop. The boxes each contain all of the ingredients that you need to serve a high quality cream tea for four people, and I was very kindly sent one of their one-off Gift Boxes to try out. Yum!
The box arrived with everything very well packaged. There’s always a slight worry when ordering boxes that contain glass items, but as you can see above, I didn’t need to be concerned in the slightest as all of the products arrived in perfect condition. The glass jars were buried underneath a large amount of paper cushioning, with the scones and tea safely beside them.
Inside the box, I have received 4 jars of scone toppings; 2 x 28g jars of The Devon Cream Company Luxury Clotted Cream and 2 x 42g jars of Mrs Bridges Scottish Strawberry Preserve. These jars were the perfect serving size as they provided all of the scones with a generous amount of cream and jam. The clotted cream had a lovely clean and fresh flavour, whilst the strawberry jam added a sweet and fruity sensation that complimented the scones beautifully.
Inside a separate bag were 4 x luxury pyramid teabags of Jenier English Royal Tea. I had a good feeling about this tea the minute I opened up the bag because my nose was greeted with the most wonderful smell! Composed of Black Tea, Green Tea, Jasmine Blossoms and Cornflower Petals, this tea was full bodied and very flavourful. I generally prefer to drink my tea without milk, but it tasted as good with as it did without.
Onto the scones themselves, there were 4 included in the box, and these ones were a Dark Chocolate and Orange flavour which is always a winning combination in my book! They’re baked fresh by Sconnoisseur right before they’re dispatched and are guaranteed to have a shelf life of at least five days from when you receive the box. These scones certainly tasted fresh, and had a lovely dense and slightly dry texture to them, as proper scones should have. The orange was more intense, and the chocolate flavour was a lot more subtle than I was expecting, but this worked really well with the clotted cream and strawberry jam. Delicious!
I shared this cream tea gift box with my sister and two friends, and all agreed that it was an excellent treat! I’d definitely recommend Sconnoisseur to anyone who is looking for a luxury food gift to send to a friend or relative. They have lots of different gift boxes to choose from with different flavours of scones and preserve options available, and of course the subscription option would make an ideal luxury gift too! For more information and for a list of prices, visit http://www.sconnoisseur.co.uk/.
